Stick products are one example of an individual frozen confectionery product that has been known for many years. They are usually produced by an “extrude and cut” process, as follows. Ice cream from the freezer is extruded vertically downwards though a nozzle onto a conveyor. Sticks are inserted as the ice cream comes out of the nozzle and a heated wire cuts it horizontally into uniform portions of the required thickness. Consumers have come to expect that ice cream stick products generally have a certain shape, typically 70-100 mm long×30-60 mm wide×15-35 mm thick with rounded corners and/or edges. This shape is produced by extruding ice cream through an orifice which has the required cross-sectional shape (the cross-section contains the two longest axes of the product).
There is a continual need to provide new and improved products in order to maintain consumers' interest. Whereas in the past products often simply consisted of ice cream with a coating such as chocolate, there is now a demand for more exciting and indulgent products, for example products wherein sauce and/or inclusions are located within the ice cream. Such products can be produced by co-extrusion of ice cream and sauce/inclusions. However, the standard “extrude and cut” process is unsatisfactory when the ice cream contains significant amounts of sauce and/or inclusions. This is because the wire cutter can hit an inclusion during the cutting step. This can cause the inclusion to be dragged by the cutter to the edge of the frozen confection resulting in deformation of the frozen confection and an uneven surface. Moreover, sauce can leak out from the ice cream at the cut surface, and stick to the conveyor or cold plate onto which it lands. Also, the cutter can be damaged by repeated contacts with hard inclusion particles, in particular if they are large in size.
WO 2010/043493 discloses a process which addresses the problem of encapsulating sauce and/or inclusions. The frozen confection is co-extruded with a filling and then cut with an iris cutter. The cross-sectional shape of the extrudate is typically circular, and the resulting product is typically approximately spherical or cylindrical. However, while this process works well for producing products in the shape of balls or rounded bars, we have found that difficulties arise in producing other products, in particular stick products having the expected shape. The iris cutter forms a peak on the cut surface, which should be flat to match the standard stick product shape. Furthermore, having an orifice with a non-circular cross-section can result in the extrudate being twisted by the blades of the iris cutter during cutting. This has the effect that when the cut extrudate lands on a receiving surface beneath the iris cutter (typically a conveyor belt), it does not land on one of its large flat surfaces. This in turn can result in misshapen products and may also cause problems for subsequent handling of the product, for example when a stick is inserted.
Therefore there remains a need for an improved method for producing stick products having the desired shape and containing a fully encapsulated filling of sauces and/or inclusions.